Adulting (v): to carry out one or more of the duties and responsibilities expected of fully developed individuals (paying off that credit card debt, settling beef without blasting social media, etc). Exclusively used by those who adult less than 50% of the time. -Curtesy of Urban Dictionary
If you’re a millennial, or even remotely of that era, I can guarantee you’ve used the term “adulting”. It’s the term we all hashtag on Instagram every time we do something responsible, like spend money on a need instead of a want. Is it wrong to want a little bit of praise for paying my bills on time…EVERY month? I’ve experienced many adulting moments in my 20’s and even more into my 30’s, but nothing has been a more revolutionizing adult moment than realizing the queen-sized body bag filled with cheap polyester fibers, metal springs and probably stale rice you’ve been sleeping on half your life was actually killing you slowly.
My chiropractor will be proud to know that I now travel with my specially contoured pillow because, well, I’m old AF. But nothing offers a supportive hug around my neck like that damn pillow does well, besides my luxe Australian wool Aritzia scarf. Who knew that I needed so much neck support just in order to fulfill daily tasks, like being able to successfully make a left-hand turn on my drive to work (a desk job). After years of sleeping on whatever was either given to me for free or on sale at Joe’s fell-off-the-truck liquidation center, I finally decided to upgrade my mattress for the sake of my quickly deteriorating lower back.
There wasn’t enough coffee in the world to make up for my lack of quality sleep. I can only assume that’s why Starbucks had to produce the Venti, for shitty sleepers and parents… of shitty sleepers. I think my last straw was when I realized that I couldn’t get a decent night’s sleep without wedging a $100 decorative pillow under my legs in order to create some sort of poor man’s version of an ultra pedic hospital bed. Every morning I’d wake up in search of my expensive pillows, the leftover remnants of my spine and the sudden urge to perform my best robot impression as I made my way to the shower without the use of my torso.
Waking up in pain just became the norm and I usually just chalked it up to sleeping weird. Have you ever noticed that whenever someone has an unexplained ache or pain, their self-diagnosis is always because they slept weird? I’m not sure what sleeping weird would even look like unless you sleep in a perfectly formed downward dog. I don’t know about you, but I don’t consider horizontal a completely out there sleeping position. Have you ever drank too much and woken up in a bathtub? THAT’S sleeping weird.
You know you’re getting old when your greatest achievement in life is getting a good night’s sleep. I guess it’s just one of the telltale signs of aging when you realize that good sleep actually matters. I’m also of the age where getting 6-8 hours of sleep a night is not only necessary but ironically, also virtually impossible. Gone are the days of staying up late, crashing on the couch, sleeping like a baby, and still being fully functional the next day. I never understood the comparison of great sleep to a baby by the way. I don’t know how many of you have ever known a baby who sleeps soundly through the night. If anything my shittiest night’s sleep should be compared to a baby’s: waking up 25 times in the middle of the night to pee and having to soothe myself back to sleep with a bottle… of wine.
They say that life is what happens when you’re lying in bed trying to fall asleep. I’m sure a lot of people can relate to spending hours (that’s right, I said hours) trying to shut their brains off at night to catch some much-coveted z’s. But your rambling thoughts usually have a different plan for you at 2 a.m. What better time to do a run-through of your entire life up until this point, or obsess about all the times your significant other put pots and pans in the dishwasher instead of just washing them up and putting them away. Your cat is even getting a better night’s sleep than you are, purring away at the end of the bed, like the cat-napping-son-of-a-bitch that he is. Your sleep-deprived self can swear you hear Samuel L Jackson reciting the words from Go the Fuck to Sleep in the background of your racing thoughts. But not even his buttery smooth voice can get you to dreamland.
Having recently moved in with my boyfriend, I’m having to re-learn how to share my bed again after years of sleeping alone. For the most part, I don’t mind it at all. It’s nice to have someone who always runs hot to warm your ice cold feet up on at any time during the night. Although, maybe they wouldn’t be so cold if my boyfriend didn’t sleep with the window wide open and the fan running full blast. I’m not sure what it would be like to feel like an actual furnace 24/7 since I’m usually colder than Candy Spelling at a family birthday party, but it does have its advantages at times. For instance, I never find myself having to fight for the covers. He graciously lets me (and the floor) have them. All of them (eye roll).
The most common complaint that I hear from my girlfriends all the time is always about their significant other’s snoring. If anything, I’m probably more likely to be the snoring one. I’ve seen many relationships go up in flames because of clashing sleep patterns. Luckily, I don’t have that problem thanks to my boyfriend’s sexy sleep apnea machine. The gentle dull hums of freshly distilled oxygen keep my boyfriend from snoring (and also from flatlining, so that’s a plus). People always ask if sleeping next to Darth Vader bothers me, but I think being awoken nightly by obnoxious snoring would bother me a lot more. I could do without him using my decorative Buddha head on my perfectly curated nightstand as his CPAP mask holder, but I guess snorers can’t be choosers. Besides, isn’t rolling over in the middle of the night and finding Bane sleeping right next to you any woman’s ultimate fantasy?
When pillow talk between my boyfriend and I turned into what body parts we wanted the other to rub based solely on our sore muscles, and realizing that the only kink going on in our bedroom were the ones in our necks, we knew we needed to make quality sleep a priority. For us, that meant the purchasing of a new mattress, which I was in total denial of needing at first. In hindsight, years of believing I slept weird and not being able to justify spending my hard-earned (well, earned) money on something that I couldn’t eat, wear or take an airplane to get to kept me from many nights of restful sleep and becoming a proper adult.
Since deciding that our first major purchase together was going to be a new bed (basically, because we couldn’t agree on whose mattress to keep and whose to toss), we bit the bullet and made the ultimate adulting couple’s commitment. If you already know me, you know that I couldn’t purchase just ANY mattress. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I have pretty exquisite taste for having just spent my last 20 bucks of overdraft on a bottle of Cab Sauv.
As a result of their impeccable marketing and an email with a one day deal that we just couldn’t refuse, we are now the proud new owners of a queen-sized Casper mattress. After reading countless reviews and being heavily influenced by those cute social media posts of people posing with their iconic blue and white shipping boxes, we sprung for the Rolls Royce of mattresses, and we don’t regret it one bit.
After making the grown-up decision to invest in ourselves, we’ve already enjoyed almost a full week’s worth of blissful, 4-layer memory foam slumber. From the moment we unrolled the vacuum-sealed mattress onto its new throw pillow covered box spring that is now our marital bed, it felt like a fresh start- adulting at its best. I feel like a new supportive mattress and an emphasis on nightly hibernation is just the beginning of the enlightening self-care decisions we are about to make now that we are approaching middle age (I just threw up in my mouth a lil bit). Who knows what comes next, we may even spring for better shoe support. Orthotics are so hot right now.
xo
Follow me! Instagram @shesallnat1 Twitter @shesallnat
shesallnat blog 